Gillard is now hostage to fortune

It was at the 30-minute mark that
Julia Gillard
took a giant leap over her 26 predecessors and claimed a unique place in Australian political history.

It had been, up until then, an unremarkable performance.

In the audience at the National Press Club, eyes were starting to lose the battle to stay open for the final few minutes of what had been billed as the Prime Minister’s opening salvo of the 2013 election campaign.

But what was to be an opening salvo turned out to be a starting gun.

And when Gillard fired it, the parliamentary press gallery was shocked into befuddlement. The questions which followed indicated that it took some time for the media representatives to fully comprehend what Gillard had just done.

What they had just heard was so remarkable, so unprecedented, so ­surprising, so unbelievable that it took time for reality to overtake shock.

The 27th prime minister of Australia had just done something never done before: she had announced the election date while the third year of the government’s term still has up to nine months to run.

None of her predecessors – many of them considered to be much better at the job, some of them considered to be great political judges – has ever been so bold as to declare open an election campaign when they still had many months to keep the question of election timing open.

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Gillard’s judgment is often seen as faulty: now she has done something truly brave – possibly crazy brave – by backing her faulty judgment with the biggest call of her prime ministership.

She explained her decision as a simple one. Gillard said it had always been her intention for the Parliament to run its normal term but already election date speculation was running wild and creating uncertainty. It made perfect sense therefore to confirm her promise to run a full term by setting the election date now, 7½ months beforehand.

But nothing is simple in politics.

Gillard was in fact using the prime minister’s unique prerogative to name the election date to create a shock, to smash normal expectations and to create a spectacular political moment.

She was using the shock of this announcement to do what she has not been able to do before – grab the nation’s attention to her leadership and to create the chance this unprecedented action might make voters reassess their view of her.

But in doing so, Gillard was taking a stupendous risk.

She was trading off the greatest of all political asserts – flexibility – for the chance to break the cycle of certain political death into which her prime ministership was increasingly trapped.

One hoped-for consequence of this in the Gillard camp will be that fixing the election date to guarantee the delivery of her repeated commitment to have the Parliament run its full term will help reduce the trust deficit that has undermined her standing with voters.

Tony Abbott
has won rich rewards from Gillard’s trust deficit.

It was the first thing he said on Wednesday in responding to Gillard’s announcement. “This election will be about trust," he said.

Gillard will also hope voters see this as decisive, brave leadership, an image she has been working on to bolster her weak standing with voters.

But the risk in playing her election timing card so soon is that she will have made herself prisoner to unpredictable and possibly uncontrollable political events.

She now has no capacity to adjust election timing if something happens which makes it harder for Labor to win on September 14.

There is a very good reason why no previous prime minister has taken the gamble Gillard has just taken: all her predecessors have kept the decision on election timing up their sleeve in case of such unforeseen events.

The problem for Gillard is that she is starting the election year with extremely limited options. The election timing card was the last big card she had to play to break the cycle and she has chosen to play it much earlier than would normally be wise.